About us

Thursday, 28 February 2013

"The
magistrates adjourned the case until March 5 for an interpreter to be present
and until then released Nowakowski on bail with conditions not to contact the
victim except via a third party for child contact and not to go to a specified
address in Dwelly Close, Chard."

Monday, 25 February 2013

Emily
Thornberry (Islington
South and Finsbury, Labour)To ask
the Attorney-General what proportion of interpreters used by Crown Prosecution
Service witness care units in (a) Lancashire, (b) Staffordshire, (c)
West Yorkshire and (d) the West Midlands were provided by Capita TI
since September 2012.

Records
held by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) are not sufficiently detailed to
calculate the proportion of interpreters used by witness care units in
Lancashire, Staffordshire, West Yorkshire and the West Midlands provided by
Capita TI since September 2012.

However,
the proportion of interpreters used by the CPS between September 2012 and
December 2012 in North West area, West Midlands area and Yorkshire and
Humberside area provided by Capita TI was 56%.

Delays following the privatisation of
court services are costing the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds, the
chairman of the Criminal Bar Association has warned.

Britain’s criminal justice system is
being destroyed by Government cuts and changes to the way courts are run, said
Michael Turner QC, who represents 3,600 lawyers as the chairman of the Criminal
Bar Association (CBA).

Turner claims taxpayers’ money is
being squandered, injustices covered up and the judiciary ‘muzzled’ by ministers
obsessed with secrecy.

He said: “If you put a contract in
place with a private supplier you’ve got to monitor its effectiveness.
Otherwise you don’t know that it’s doing what it says it’s doing, which is
saving the taxpayer money.”

He told Exaro: “It costs a £110 a
minute to run a courtroom with a jury. Every minute of delay is costing someone
further down the line. Bench delays are so endemic in our court system now.

“The taxpayer is picking up the tab
on a bill that the taxpayer never sees, because GEOAmey, the company charged
with bringing prisoners to court, can’t deliver; because Applied Language
Solutions supply translators who can’t speak the language that they’re required
to.”

[…] Three weeks ago, Exaro revealed
that MPs had suggested that that the MoJ was in “contempt”, such was the extent
to which it had hampered an investigation into shortcomings of translation
services for courts.

Turner is also concerned about
growing secrecy in the judicial system: “Look at the other pieces of
legislation that the government is seeking to introduce, secrecy in the
courtroom, which is designed to protect the government from the revelation that
they’ve been involved in extraordinary rendition and torture.”

He believes the government should not
be allowed to interfere in courts on security grounds, as they can already be
closed at the judge’s discretion: “There are all sorts of protections for these
witnesses [from the secret service] that are absolutely satisfactory.

“In five years’ time, you will not
have a justice system that will allow people to expose the dreadful lies that
were told in the Hillsborough case, because they won’t be there, the lawyers
will have gone.” […]

Friday, 22 February 2013

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/crime/cannabis-farm-accused-sent-to-crown-court-1-543513422 February 2013[...] "Duong Van
Nguyen, who cannot speak English, had his first formal court hearing yesterday
in connection with a cannabis farm which was found at a flat in Sunderland
Road, South Shields, last Thursday.Yesterday was the 19-year-old’s fourth time at
South Tyneside Magistrates’ Court since then, but no progress was made on the
other occasions because there were no interpreters available at court."